Let's Call Time-Out On Unionizing College Football Players

Last week, a regional director of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) ruled that because members of Northwestern University’s football team seem close enough to “employees” of the university to satisfy the statutory definition, they can proceed in their stated desire for union representation.

The United Steelworkers union, hoping for a transfusion of dues money, helped the activist players, led by quarterback Kain Colter, push their petition for a union certification election. Conceivably, the union could wind up negotiating on behalf of the Northwestern players with the university over all matters that are subjects of collective bargaining under the law – compensation, hours, benefits, and working conditions.

This is unprecedented. Unions currently represent quite a few workers at universities, including faculty members, but not undergraduates who are on sports teams. Regional director Peter Ohr, who made the ruling, points out that the players receive compensation, even if it’s not taxable cash, in the form of scholarships and training; also, they are required to put in a lot of heavily supervised time relating to the team if they want to continue to play. That is enough, in his view, to bring them under the definition of employees, and therefore eligible to seek union representation under the National Labor Relations Act. (That’s the worst of our lousy labor laws, as I wrote about here.)

Treating college athletes (there is no reason to limit this ruling just to football players) is stretching the law. Even though the players usually devote more time and effort to the team than they do to their academic work – sometimes the ratio approaches infinity given the paltry academic requirements for big-sport athletes – they do not have employment contracts to work as running backs, tackles, linebackers, etc.

They have been admitted as students and can be removed from the team or even flunk out of the school entirely if their academic work is not good enough. In what other job does a worker’s continuance in it depend on a factor that has nothing whatsoever to do with his performance in that job? No steel worker was ever fired because he couldn’t write an acceptable paper on Pride and Prejudice.

Although the notion of amateur student-athletes has come in for a lot of well-deserved mockery, it’s a mistake to leap to the opposite extreme and declare players to be employees. Northwestern will appeal the ruling and perhaps the full NLRB (despite its proclivity to rule in ways that help Obama’s allies in Big Labor) will see the scope of the law less expansively than regional director Ohr does.

The dispute over the meaning of the term “employee” in the National Labor Relations Act, is not, however, the most interesting point here. More interesting is the notion that unionization can do much to improve the lives of college football players. I do not think it can do so to any significant degree and whatever marginal gains collective bargaining might bring for the players must come at the expense of other parts of the university community.

Bear in mind that unions do not increase wealth. They consume some wealth themselves (union officials live very well) and endeavor to redistribute more of it from other people (business owners, taxpayers, consumers) into the pockets of those workers they represent. The NLF Players Association, for example, does not increase the revenues of pro football, but simply diverts some of the revenue stream away from the very wealthy owners and into the pockets of NFL players.

What about the large revenue stream of big-time college sports? While it is true that college sports do bring in revenues for their schools, in most instances, the revenues are not sufficient to offset the costs of the teams. Professor David Welch Suggs of the University of Georgia points out in an article published by the American Council on Education, “Myth: College Sports are a Cash Cow” that in the period 2005-2009, only eight public universities broke even or had net operating income on their athletic programs: Louisiana State, Penn State, Iowa, Michigan, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Texas, and Georgia.

Professor Suggs concludes, “College sports can be a marvelous value experience and a focal point for community-building. But only a few colleges have programs that can provide such benefits without imposing significant costs on their institutions.” He is right and it is therefore hard to see how unionizing Northwestern’s football players can do anything to make them better off without shifting resources away from other parts of the university.

It is possible for the NFLPA to squeeze more out of super-wealthy team owners for the benefit of the players without taking anything away from all the other people who work for NFL teams. It is not, however, possible for the Steelworkers to squeeze more out of Northwestern for the players without imposing further costs on a university that already subsidizes the team. Some other part of the university’s budget would have to take a hit. If that were to happen, it would make people wonder about the priorities at the school.

Some of those who might wonder are the alumni and other donors who write checks to support Northwestern. If the Steelworkers start bargaining for the players, who are among the elite on campus with their full-ride scholarships, free room and board, fabulous food, travel, and academic coddling, that could lead to a counter-reaction by donors who do not want to see the sports tail wag the academic dog any more than it already does.

More than a few American workers who once thought that unionization would make their lives much better eventually came to realize that it brings with it unintended consequences they hadn’t considered and don’t like. That will prove to be the case here.

Some of the Northwestern players seem to have been taken in with the Marxian notion that they’re being exploited and unionization will get them, as Samuel Gompers said was always the goal of unions, more. But they are not exploited. In fact, they profit handsomely from the facts that America has a lot of wealth and that many of us enjoy college sports.

Trying to extract more through unionization could be one of the most foolhardy plays ever called.

The Rock at Northwestern University with University Hall in the background (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I am a law school graduate who went into teaching rather than legal practice and then began to see how badly government has mangled education at all levels. Since 1999, I have worked at the John W. Pope Center for Higher Education Policy, a think tank that takes a critical ...